Holiday Hoaxes Unwrapped: Fake Trees, Freebies, & Shopping Sprees
Scammers Orchestrate Cross-Platform Social Media Campaigns to Steal Money and Personal Information During Holiday Shopping Season
Online scams have surged in recent years, as our lives increasingly move online and scammers leverage new technologies in attempts to defraud greater numbers of people. Chief among them are shopping scams, which accounted for 42% of online scams reported worldwide in 2023, according to data insights firm Statista. In 2022, U.S. officials said online shopping scams cost over $70 million during the holiday season alone.
Through our intelligence reporting, Graphika regularly detects, tracks, and helps disrupt a wide array of scams on multiple platforms. Working with industry partners at Meta, we are now joining a campaign to raise public awareness about online scams. This first report focuses on online shopping scams ahead of major holidays and e-commerce events in multiple countries.
Here we provide details of scams targeting shoppers and social media users during the November and December holiday season. Our findings are not exhaustive but rather a set of case studies illustrating how these types of scams attempt to engage, deceive, and defraud people of their money and sensitive personal information. We’ve selected the examples based on a combination of key attributes, including their relevance as online shopping scams, prevalence across internet platforms, and notable tactics, techniques, and procedures.
Léa Ronzaud
Senior Analyst
Léa Ronzaud leads monitoring and investigations into the detection and tracking of Russian influence operations and violent extremist groups. She also researches nihilistic violent extremism and hacktivism. Léa’s work has helped disrupt efforts by extremists in multiple countries to orchestrate real-world harm and exposed the inner workings of nation-state influence operations from Russia, China, and Iran.
Jean le Roux
Senior Investigator
Jean le Roux leverages open-source intelligence (OSINT) and network analysis to identify, map, and analyze online influence operations and platform abuse for Graphika. Previously, Jean was a Research Associate with the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), where he led investigations into disinformation campaigns and information operations across Sub-Saharan Africa.
Download the complete PDF
The full report includes the complete network graph maps, raw attribution indicators, cross-platform topology analysis, and the full takedown timeline with platform-level data.
- Full network graph visualizations
- Attribution indicators with confidence scores
- Raw behavioral modeling data
- Takedown coordination timeline
Related Reports
Likes for Lorestan
On Oct. 11, Facebook said it had removed a network of 93 profiles, 15 groups, 14 pages and 194 Instagram accounts in September that originated in Iran and engaged in “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” to target domestic audiences in the country. We identified multiple open-source indicators that appear to corroborate Facebook’s attribution to individuals associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Read the Report
Free Money & Pig Butchers: Crypto Fraud and Scams on Social Media
An examination of nine common cryptocurrency-related scam and fraud schemes.
Read the Report
Fauxmantic Overtures
Synthetic Dating Profiles on Social Platforms Funnel Romance Seekers Into Chinese-Operated Online Scam
Read the ReportSee How Graphika Can Help Your Team Act on This Intelligence
This report is one of 600+ investigations Graphika’s team has published. Our platform gives your analysts continuous access to the same intelligence — plus the tools to apply it to your specific threat environment.